ts fountains and its
statues is one of the places of chief interest in the City. But
especially because there stands along one side of it the vast pile of
the Grand Palaver Hotel. It rises fifteen stories high and fills all
one side of the square. It has, overlooking the trees in the square,
twelve hundred rooms with three thousand windows, and it would have
held all George Washington's army. Even people in other cities who have
never seen it know it well from its advertising; "the most homelike
hotel in America," so it is labelled in all the magazines, the
expensive ones, on the continent. In fact, the aim of the company that
owns the Grand Palaver--and they do not attempt to conceal it--is to
make the place as much a home as possible. Therein lies its charm. It
is a home. You realize that when you look up at the Grand Palaver from
the square at night when the twelve hundred guests have turned on the
lights of the three thousand windows. You realize it at theatre time
when the great string of motors come sweeping to the doors of the
Palaver, to carry the twelve hundred guests to twelve hundred seats in
the theatres at four dollars a seat. But most of all do you appreciate
the character of the Grand Palaver when you step into its rotunda.
Aladdin's enchanted palace was nothing to it. It has a vast ceiling
with a hundred glittering lights, and within it night and day is a
surging crowd that is never still and a babel of voices that is never
hushed, and over all there hangs an enchanted cloud of thin blue
tobacco smoke such as might enshroud the conjured vision of a magician
of Baghdad or Damascus.

In and through the rotunda there are palm trees to rest the eye and
rubber trees in boxes to soothe the mind, and there are great leather
lounges and deep armchairs, and here and there huge brass ash-bowls as
big as Etruscan tear-jugs. Along one side is a counter with grated
wickets like a bank, and behind it are five clerks with flattened hair
and tall collars, dressed in long black frock-coats all day like
members of a legislature. They have great books in front of them in
which they study unceasingly, and at their lightest thought they strike
a bell with the open palm of their hand, and at the sound of it a page
boy in a monkey suit, with G.P. stamped all over him in brass, bounds
to the desk and off again, shouting a call into the unheeding crowd
vociferously. The sound of it fills for a moment the great space of the
rotu